Day: October 2, 2009

Huffington Post commenters react to the story of baseball player Ted Williams' cryogenically frozen head being beaten with a wrench by a low wage lab employee:

1:

A head, and practically anything else for that matter, frozen in liquid oxygen would shatter if hit by a wrench or some other solid object.

2:

There is no promise that a reanimation will be a life worth living.

People who have been privileged do not know how hard life sucks.

One time around is plenty for me.

When life has been mostly bad, the end will be a relief.

Ted Williams experienced worship and prosperity for playing a childs game.

I have work like a slave and have jack shiat to show for it.

Maybe his next existence will have to be more like mine.

3 (an exchange):

[...] You could theoretically feed the brain matter to the growing child and it may or may not end up having the memories of the original. Some scientific studies have been done with mice in which brain matter from mice perviously successfully trained to navigate mazes was fed to another mouse which in turn "learned" how to navigate the same mazes without any training at all. The brain matter was fed to them raw and fresh so I'm not sure if a previously frozen brain would work similarly.

I hope you don't expect us to believe that feeding a person brain matter from another entity ..will end up making it's way to that person's brain and thereby through osmosis that it will then render the person able to have that entity's thoughts and emotions etc.

Did you even really read my post. I said that the mice were fed the Raw Brain matter of the other mice. Did you get that RAW, and I never said that I knew for a fact that it would work for people only that it had been done in experiments with mice and it did work for them. If you would like to prove or disprove the theory then give it a go and try it yourself.

4:

I think it would be funny if someone who was cryogenically frozen was reanimated thousands of years into the future only to be put on trial for some activity people in our time took part in that ruined the world for them. Like pollution or something.

I mean, why do people always assume that if they're revived in the future everyone's going to want to be nice to them? How do we know they won't be angry with how the world turned out and want revenge?

Am casually tracking the use of the phrase "reach out."
It has a phony spiritual ring. You don't say hey to an estranged loved one who has abandoned his or her religion, you "reach out" to them.
That emotionally-fraught sense of the word can be seen in these Wikipedia topics:

"Reach Out I'll Be There", a 1966 song by The Four Tops

Reach Out, a Texas-based charitable group that puts on Reach Music Festival

Reach Out! is an internet service targeted at young people that aims to provide information, support and resources about mental health issues and enable them to develop resilience, increase coping skills, and facilitate help-seeking behaviour.

I call it "phony" because the emotional sense has long been cheapened with ad campaigns such as the phone company's from a while back, "Reach Out and Touch Someone," which encouraged you to run up your long distance tab.

In the past several years, though, it has become business jargon. One day I had two voicemails from bank staffers I had called about CD rates, in two separate branches, who didn't say they were getting back to me, but were "reaching out" to me.

Today I encountered it in the New York Times, in the most secular context imaginable, a story about David Letterman being extorted over affairs with staffers:

Mr. Letterman said he reached out to the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Re-e-ach out, and touch a DA.